It was a perfect Sunday afternoon for sailing: an Indian Summer day and just a hint of autumn in the air. 25 of us (and a dog named Bobbie) went out on The Ventura, a single-masted, wooden sailing yacht commissioned in 1919. The cruises are arranged through DBA, a pub in the East Village. I’ve […]

The first time I came to San Francisco, I was in the back seat of my parent’s car, on another of my family’s extended summer vacations, most often wrapped around the week of a convention of barbershop singers. I must have been around 13 or so. We drove across California and I distinctly remember driving

27 hours after stepping onto a bus near Urfa, I finally arrived in Fethiye, Turkey. I set my pack on the bed and reached down to take off my Teva sandals. What I saw was shocking… my ankles were swollen as big as hams, bulging around the sandal straps. Suddenly I had sympathy for the

When I checked into my room at the hotel in Selçuk, Turkey, I could see what looked like a giant nest on top of the remaining pillar of what was once a Byzantine aqueduct. I went out for the afternoon and saw some of the sights in Selçuk — including the ruins of the Basilica

Everyone has a story about that morning. Mine began at the YMCA. Oblivious to what would happen a mere mile away, I wore headphones and trudged and sweated to the beat of music on some kind of exercise machine while demons with first class one way tickets slit throats and prepared to do the unthinkable.

As I continue my backlog of images and tales of my travels this past summer, here are some images of Ephesus (Efes), often called one of the best preserved ancient cities in the Mediterranean. It’s just down the road from the site of the Temple of Artemis, which was one of the Seven Wonders of

This week’s Sunday travel section in the New York Times features a piece on upscale tourism in  Cappadocia (“A Moonscape Carved by Nature and Man,” September 9, 2007) the region of Turkey where I hiked and traveled last month. The writer, Gisella Williams, describes the Pigeon Valley near the town of Uchisar as “an outrageously

I arrived at JFK on a day New York taxi drivers were out on strike. “This is going to cost me,” I muttered to myself as I queued up with others heading Big Apple-ward. I wondered what the taxi driver’s little book would say the fare is to get me to Jersey City, where I’m

The cover of the previous edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook for Turkey features a photograph of a stone head, its face filled with cracks as though it were made from dried mud, sitting among boulders and scree, soaking in the sunset. Among the icons of Turkey – the flag, the fez, the whirling dervish,